Where went the Whips, or, Why didn't Schumer play for a mistrial?

Bearing in mind, that the prosecutorial obligation in the late Senatorial miscarriage of justice had always been, to minimize the shame of the United States to her people and to the world, anguished partisans had counseled against procuring the underlying impeachment, at all. That would only have established the impression of unanimous indifference to the structure and scruples of their government, and yet no one foresaw honest conduct in the Republican near-majority. In other words, the Senate trial went ahead with only the most hilari-ously forbidding impediments before it.

This was no excuse for the abdication of strategy; rather, resolution ran only the other way. Yet evidently, only the tactic for achieving a poignant loss seemed to guide prosecutorial conduct, a posture lending ample shelter to the other side. The responsibly canny tactic, leaping into the lap to lick the face and wag the whole Canterbury pilgrimage, lay rolling around on the floor, rather, like a spent bottle of gin.

With endlessly voluminous wreckage from the previous government demanding immediate attention, to say nothing of the vilest maladministration of public health since the government's Tuskegee frolics with syphillis, pressing hard for Senatorial dispatch, the languishing of a lost cause against the same "massive resistance" would have suggested, to any strategist, a plan to exhibit the highest quality of proof with an eye to shielding it, at present, from the mockery of a verdict. It would have taken many months to compel the necessary testimony of witnesses, and for the rot only beginning in the defendant's reputation to expand to critical mass, before something resembling an open mind should invade the Republican redoubt. A schoolchild knew this.

Yet by no more than majority vote, firmly in his grasp, Schumer was in a position to introduce a motion to declare a mistrial as of Saturday morning, on the fortuitous emergence of obliterating and incontro-vertible evidence of the defendant's guilt, which only time and the press of responsible governance precluded the Senate from exhibiting. To the positively rapturous outcry of oppressive practice, certain to emerge from the minority, Schumer had been schooled by his predecessor already, to observe that elections have consequences.

There are valiant and almost cogently palliative opinions in print even now, to the effect that the most poignant defeat of American honor was elegantly achieved. These exultations are impossible to score, with any instrument of reliable pitch. A mistrial, on the other hand, with its open threat of a new trial at any time during the term of the present Congress, would leave the defendant where he belongs, and the United States with a victory unambiguously pending. 

Even a child learns how to wait.

i   François Reichenbach, 1954

ii  Private source, 1955

  

Samothrace revisited

Approaching tabulations of the final two per-cent of ballots cast, the State of Georgia was seen today to have rejected the campaigns for re-election of incumbent Senators representing the same Party, replacing them with candidates offering instead to represent people of Georgia. 

Resisting this distinction, 

much discordant heat had been generated by the disgraced head of the Party, which was anxious-

ly observed, suffered, and seen transformed into light by those it had scorched. 

 

Timely blades and second chances

No one, of course, has any appetite for
seeing a certain name again, except as

a line to avoid selecting, at the top of 

his ballot, At last the gathering of a di-

verse and remarkably distributed storm

of revulsion is poised to restore self-

determination to the United States. The

ingenious photography of Damon Winter of

The New York Times portrays a rescue op-

eration deeply reminiscent of med-evac

Hueys lifting from the battlefields of

Southeast Asia, saving the passengers if

possible, but more certainly ceding na-

tive ground from which they are removed.

Nor was this an expulsion by cruel chance,

but by the incapacity and illegitimacy of

the occupation, revealed in its helpless

incompetence and reliance on its own lies.

This chance is one not to blow, but also

not to crow. It's generous, even to desig-

nate this deliverance as a restoration, 

given how few have ever influenced their

own governance in this country. But every

such valuation is relative, and is being

re-examined under pressures both urgent -

pandemic, racial discord, economic dis-

location - and implacable - climatic

crises, other environmental despoiling,

and international security hazards both

recklessly propagated or negligently

denied by the government soon to depart.

The circumstances are auspicious for a

popular insistence on self-determination.

They are equally vulnerable to repressive

pre-emption, which is the unfailing custom

of our history. But now at least we know

why: racism has been the contortionist

corrupter of every populist opportunity in

this nation's experience. This contortion-

ist is avid to overwhelm the pending elec-

tion by intimidation, deception, malicious

prosecution, and every rejection available.

At last, the great anti-progressive energy

of the American experience has fallen into

the hands of a spent force. We now behold

the readying of an electoral swift sword -

a climax of nothing, a beginning to be de- 

termined by the People. We have our vote. 

Word from the land of always something

 

Word came to Americans some time in

the evening of the 18th that a hold-

out against replacement on the high

court had passed from the scene, al-

lowing speculation of whether, how,

when, by whom something definitive

would be done about this. This was

not the first intrusion on a wedding

anniversary of mine, when a highly

presentable plate of rognons de veau

was first served to me on the night

of my farewell to the East Coast. I

found myself back here eventually,

unmarried, and although cured of com-

memorating occasions with food, still

easily consoled by a determined defer-

ence to offal.

This latest bulletin in the struggle

for power in the United States found

me just as glad to be able to rely on

my friends already to be in earnest,

plotting various interventions. No 

one had telephoned me, anguished to

be reminded, how to breathe, and I

found myself managing equally well,

once I'd recalled the virtues of 

fresh coffee. Not for this house-

hold, then, will hands be wrung in

wonder of what will become of life

for another 40 terms of this court;

no swooning on the indignity of the

present power structure's swan song

of bottomless villainy. Possibly,

some frantic defections from that

cabal can be negotiated; possibly

a bolt of gastronomic clarity will

descend upon the illumination of

well-grazed kidneys, but in any

case, calving season will return, 

in all its telling raucousness.

For more than 50 years, a tenuous

claim to a position in the general

population and an ill-bred fixation

on the mythology of judicial review

have left me with the conviction 

set out above, that one's time can

much more securely be invested in

a study of the classics in cuisine

than in the tergiversations of a

casuist tradition under demagog-

ic appointment. Enough, please, 

of heroes of magical powers. Win

games, breed good beasts, honor

reality. 

Now. That's revenge.

Origins of Wednesday cxi: A country maybe to be living in

  No, I didn't believe it either, when

  I heard that New Yorkers were buying

  cars to get around, much less that a

  chance had been laid upon the table,

  of a government not to make us sick.

  It's enough to promise to stop World

  War II, as the 1918 pandemic did, or

  maybe just refocus it on fascists of

  our own. But I stray, which the Bid-

  en campaign, so far, does not. Nice. 

Tom Cotton, Tom Cotton: whose moon's misbegotten?

I ask you to imagine being a fellow

with a nicely developed capability  

to pass as conventional, who wanted

as much to be admired as something

of the model for that virtue. You'd

leap at the chance to have been

named Tom Cotton, would you not? Ah:

a burnished ordinariness, with the

sobriquet to make Huck Finn wilt with

envy! One could go far, even within

the enchanted salons of condescension.

Even if ordinariness where you come

from is racist, even if convention

where you come from is the chivalry

of the anguished lost cause, even if

the way to be its model is to linger

for the retirement of the drooling-

est old dog, Tom Cotton plucks you

from the vestibule of pretenders.

What say you, Robert Penn Warren? 

Thus at last, the mise-en-scène

had been laid for our own Tom Cotton,

the scrupulously exact impersonator

of such knighthood, to pass an op-

Ed diatribe through that most con-

tested gate in journalism, the guest

room of The New York Times.

A lifelong dissident friend of mine

found it reprehensible, that the

inn-keeper hadn't even read the

text, but what would he read it for?

Accuracy of aim, when its aim would

perforce be so corrupted, the gauge

does not exist to measure it? Impec-

cability of grammar, when the death

of that value is one of the merriest

bear-baiting rites of modern media?

Virtue of advice, when its virtue

swims up through such a provenance

of the cuspidor as to cite mucosity 

as its sponsor? Probably not. An edit-

or who vouches for a guest will only

contradict himself with the next one.

That much being obvious, we need turn

to the intoxicated momentum of de-

manding heresy in defense of prin-

ciples too ascendant to be trusted.

Do we need a more handsome depiction 

of crowd-sourcing our shunnings, a

loftier torch of our convictions,

than a festival for their frailty?

Anti-racism is having such a vogue,

just now, that it seemingly can't be

trusted to remain a default condition

of human literacy. Enter the keepers

of the flame, to be sure their as-

sociations are unviolated; hoist the

petard of endangerment. Exile the

editor, by that brightest of all hy-

pocrisies, the exhibition of chastity.

Another friend, whose long leniency 

to rmbl has shown no audible limit,

has gently inquired into the cause of

its present mode of meagreness. That

question claims priority for its own

occasion, but a silence in the face 

of an epistolary auto-da-fé such as

this, is not within one's capability.

One can hardly feel let down, by the

publisher's concession to his flock,

in re-assigning a person who misjudged

the terms of a private employment. One

can claim no necessity to publish an

essay of such silly insistences, as

Tom Cotton submitted to the Times. Yet

again and again and again and again,

excuses have to be made for benign 

distrust of the mind, or this must be

recognized as its universal menace. 

No huzzahs for any nitwit's repression 

can possibly advance the cause of jus-

tice better, than the exhibition of

the awesomely distinguished Tom Cotton.

It's possible to see a particular dan-

ger, in any impression of thinking as

a correspondent to Americans. It is 

that their impression of themselves is

so variable that it is too often at

its least stable, when it is certain.

I don't fear Tom Cotton. I can resist 

his repulsive gambit, but he's not our

dog in this hunt. It is one thing to be 

ineducable. Yet another, to demand to be.

Tom Cotton

Send in the Troops

The New York Times

June 3, 2020

"Change," and other motives

I have been toying with an impression that one could be relevant with-out, necessarily, being topical. Circumstances, it now seems to me, are not a bar to this ambition, so much as the intrusive omnipresence is, of the day’s leading personality. This represents a measurement of the scale of the latter as greater, possibly not to our surprise, than that of the most unnerving neutral scourge to engulf the planet in the present generation; and this would be true if he hadn’t undertaken, with his genius for precaution and infamous antic exuberance, to inflate the horror of it all past humane imagining. 

Children, raised in the most distant continents, studying the seizure of their parents and siblings by protracted asphyxiating torment and implacable extinguishment, must now mature in the understanding that what crippling he willed upon the vital organs of international epidemiological co-operation, had left his signature on these more proximate formations of their consciousness. A mind, we used to say in charitable moments, is a terrible thing to waste, only to discover now that the waste of a terrible mind lives after it. In short, laboring under the oppression of the rudest topicality, we must inquire again, Es muss sein?

Yet I couldn’t claim the agency of my own reflection as giving form to these effects, without the help and support of two of our least impeachable chronic-lers these days, Haberman and Martin of The New York Times, who published today this fascinating reduction as their lead:

President Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Mr. Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

And you were suspecting, dear Reader, that a reference to remote continents were a reach too far? Well, then you are exactly the reader to see this Pulitzer-provenanced projection for what it is: a preposterous hypothetical. It isn’t necessary to be an Isaac Newton to recall that inertia on a certain scale does not turn on a dime.

The stunning silliness of the condition laid down in this writing only exposes, once again, how confident so many have become in the habitation of unreality, or rather, the shiny-object dominion. Republican officekeepers don’t clamor for a radically improved course. They want a defter twirl of the topics. The passivity to which they’ve succumbed has never been more eloquently pealed. At the same time, the exalted powers presumed by our correspondents, for the constant puller of their focus, can be a lesson to us all in what to read. 

I’ve been wondering if Miss Anne really could have harbored a conjugal intention toward Wentworth through all those missing years, without her captivity in Austen's fiction, and why Fielding's Sophie Western exhibited such indifference to the escapades of Tom Jones, unless her education in Paris had been comparably varied, or reconciled to exploiting his. 

Even now, though, I marvel that our media could be so helplessly fully abducted, as to leave us having to accost each other for the preservation of relevance. And who better, to cultivate the taste for what we must hear?

ii   Robert Mapplethorpe, USS Coral Sea, 1983

iii  Arnold Newman, Igor Stravinsky, 1946

iv   Bill Emrich, unidentified models, 1991

NB  The final link refers to a column published
        several hours after this posting, and was
        inserted as compatible, the next day, with
        no change in the original posting.

Saturday commute clxxx: No rush ii

Like Stephen Spender, discovering
he'd been discovered by Pasternak,
Spring has been patient with us in
Virginia this year, on the sound
principle that someone is bound to
notice her before the onset of our
regional tragedy, Summer. At the
same time, this page has enjoyed 
an unannounced interruption of un-
usual length, for us, in the less
tenable belief that the American
President's lust for exhibiting
himself at his worst will dissip-
ate, allowing a subtlety like bud-
break to be restored to its proper
place above the fold. But now our
Piedmont temperatures are rising
to the 80s, F, placing us on not-
ice to take note. We do, and the
excuse is not unwelcome, to shed
our screen of distance from an
effrontery of just the right kind.

Christopher Schulze x Adam Washington